In the alternate-reality version of this weekend, my husband and I would be at an elaborate Indian-Nepalese wedding in Minneapolis.

A former colleague would be getting married. It would be my first visit to Minnesota, and I had planned to see a few lakes and sample a tater tot hot-dish. Before we left, I would have asked my daughter about the ACT she’d have taken.

Earlier in the week, our family would have joined in one of our favorite traditions: going to the Passover Seder at Sally and Dick’s home. When they were younger, my children would join the search for the hidden afikoman.

Some of you would be in special church services and gathered with your families for egg hunts and Easter dinners. I would admire the pictures you would post of your kids in their fancy clothes. My favorites are the ones in which the kid looks like he can’t wait to get out of his dress pants into a pair of shorts.

In our actual reality, more than a dozen people tested positive for COVID-19 at my husband’s workplace, where he still goes every day. A front-line doctor we know is on life support after getting infected. My brother, also a physician, treated a patient in an isolation ward.

Instead of talking about a summer trip we had planned to Yellowstone, we’ve talked about updating our wills.

Living through a catastrophe unlike anything we’ve experienced before is a strange roller coaster of feelings. We are hyper-aware and thankful for being alive, while scared of a lurking death, trying to sneak in on an airborne particle. We are dealing with stress that feels uniquely terrible, but is actually pretty universal right now. We all know someone who has lost a job or shuttered a business or gotten sick or is worried about the rent or buying groceries. And if we’re not among those in the most dire circumstances, we are grateful to be among the shut-ins. 

But it’s hard not to consider, however fleetingly, the alternate realities that have slipped away. For me, it’s the one in which I recently returned from New York City, where we premiered my new documentary film project, and I am planning the rest of the festival circuit. There’s another one in which we are discussing which colleges my daughter wants to visit this summer. Now, no one knows when schools might reopen or when New York City will heal and recover from the brutal attack of this pandemic.

How can a month feel like a lifetime ago?

If we’re lucky, we will get to do all the things again. We will get to hug our parents and grandparents, hang out with our friends, pray in congregations, dine in restaurants, travel without worry, shop in stocked grocery stores, attend weddings and funerals, and trust hospitals to have supplies to take care of us if we get critically sick. Even things that seemed mundane before, like sitting at my desk in an office surrounded by colleagues, will feel special for a while.

Maybe as we get further into this isolated new normal, we will forget the alternate realities that could have happened.

The dear family friend we had planned to ask to stay with our children while we attended this weekend’s wedding had taken care of them when they were babies, years ago. The wedding was canceled before we had a chance to ask her, but we reached out recently to see how she’s doing.

She had gone to the ER early in March with a severe backache. It turned out to be advanced stage breast cancer. There’s never a good time to get cancer, but this may be the worst time.

It’s a time when we want to hold the people we love tighter, but that same love forces us to keep them at a distance.

These days, I’m trying to think about the brighter spots ahead on this new timeline. The kids will be back in school in the fall. We will celebrate my friend’s wedding in Minnesota. I’ll take a meal to our friend recovering from cancer.

Everyone we love survives.

I’m praying for that reality.

The fight against the coronavirus invokes the language and imagery of war. It’s a battle, with health care workers on the front lines, the wounded dying alone, hospital ships deployed to hot zones and makeshift morgues to store the dead.

But unlike any war we’ve ever fought before, our front lines are filled with mothers. Nearly 90% of registered nurses in America are women. About a third of practicing doctors are women. They, along with their male colleagues, are being treated in ways we could never fathom our government treating soldiers in a war fought with missiles and bombs. 

There still aren’t enough tests, even though the president and vice president promised there would be. There still aren’t enough N95 masks or ventilators, despite weeks of pleading for help. As early as Feb. 5, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar asked for $2 billion to buy respirator masks and other supplies for a depleted federal stockpile of emergency medical equipment. The White House cut that request by 75%, the Washington Post reported. The coronavirus was spiking in other parts of the world then, but American leaders were still downplaying it and comparing it to the flu, as they continued to do during the most critical weeks that could have been used to contain the damage.

Let’s compare this war, where health care workers are being asked to fight under unconscionable conditions, to how our country responded the last time we were under attack.

The United States has spent more than $2 trillion on its war on terror just through the Department of Defense spending. More people in America have now died of COVID-19 than were killed in the attacks on Sept. 11. The Defense Production Act -- which the New York Times reported has been used hundreds of thousands of times in the Trump years to speed production of chemicals used to construct military missiles, procure materials needed to build drones, and order body armor for border-patrol agents -- was sidelined for too long in a war against a virus now projecting to kill hundreds of thousands of us. Despite the willingness to use the act for military supplies, the president became reluctant to use it to compel production of desperately needed medical supplies.

Why didn’t this war fought in American emergency rooms mobilize the same sense of urgency, the same resources, as the wars fought in Middle Eastern deserts?

Explain that to Dr. Christie Pickrell, an ER doctor at Mercy Hospital in St. Louis and EMS medical director for the Mehlville Fire Department. Her husband is also a physician. They have three children, ages 6, 3 and 1.

Their baby had a fever for five days, and they tried to get him tested for COVID-19. Their pediatrician told them to call the hospital COVID hotline to set up testing, but they were told he didn’t qualify, despite being in a household with two physicians with known exposure. They had to cancel their child care, because they were told to presume their baby is COVID positive. They rearranged their work schedules, but are still expected to go into work.

“None of this makes sense,” Pickrell said. “Right now, because the number of cases in Missouri are grossly underreported, I’m truly scared for the public.”

People don’t realize how many patients they are sending home with symptoms, without testing, and telling them to assume they are positive, she said.

“I’ve never felt so helpless” as a doctor, she said. “I took a Hippocratic oath to take care of people. That’s what I signed up for. But when my son has a fever, what about my own family? Why can’t I take care of them?”

It wasn’t until 2013 that the Secretary of Defense removed the military’s long-standing ban on women serving in combat. In this war against coronavirus, the CDC has said health care workers, some of whom are single mothers with babies at home, can resort to bandanas and scarves if they can’t get the protective equipment they need. Imagine our government telling Marines in a war zone to fashion their own helmets and weapons.

Nevertheless, health care “soldiers” continue to show up. Pickrell, who is 35, said she has offered to take the riskier procedures, like putting patients on ventilators, from her older male colleagues, whose age and gender makes them more vulnerable to complications if they become infected.

In this war, a young mom with sick children at home is protecting the older male doctors in her department by risking her own life.

And our country can’t promise her a clean respirator or a COVID test for her babies.

As I write this, my teenage children begin their first day of distance learning. I’m already yearning for their schools to reopen, even though I’ve accepted that this won’t be happening anytime soon.

Officials shut down schools across the country in attempts to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. This means our children are home all day, every day, while many of us are working and trying to supervise the virtual homeschooling that is supposed to happen.

In my defense, we’ve already spent 11 days socially isolating at home together due to an extended spring break. During those 11 days, the world has been upended in a way I haven’t seen before. I’ve been reading about, talking to and writing about people whose lives and livelihoods hang in a precarious balance.

During the same 11 days, I’ve watched the teens sleep in, binge-watch Netflix and wait to be invited to do basic chores like the dishes, walking the dog or helping with dinner.

I’ve reached the limit of my patience with that approach.

Adolescence in the time of coronavirus is going to mean growing up faster than the previous timetable allowed. I don’t mean to suggest that teenage brains are going to magically mature faster during a pandemic. Nor am I unsympathetic to what young people have lost -- their graduation ceremonies, proms, final sports seasons and performances, the last months with their friends, college visits -- there’s a long list of how this has affected their lives in sad and unfair ways.

But once they’ve had some time to deal with these disappointments, they should also prepare to realize that most family households no longer orbit around their schedules.

The weekdays B.C. (before coronavirus) had a structure: kids out the door by 7:10 a.m.; back home sometime between 3:30 and 5:30 p.m., depending on the after-school activities; dinner around 6:30; up in their rooms for the rest of the evening, mostly doing homework. On some weekdays, the after-school activities demanded more hours, and weekends often involved some kind of tournament or competition or performance.

This is how life operated for many children and teens.

All of that has come to a screeching halt. In response, our expectations for their routines and contributions to family and community life must also change.

Initially, I gave my kids a few talks about rising to the occasion and keeping a sense of perspective of what this national crisis means to millions of people. They listened, but I don’t know that they really got it. Perhaps those lectures have lacked specificity in how I expected their behaviors to change. So, the longer they continued their spring break of doing nothing much, the more aggravated I got.

We had a morning meeting before their first virtual day of high school began. I told them the start times for their school days, household responsibilities to keep track of during the day and expectations of when all devices would be turned in at night. I said they needed to share a daily project outside their schoolwork that contributes to the greater good somehow. I’m not sure how closely or cheerfully this guidance will be followed. But it was helpful to spell out what the new expectations and consequences are.

A week ago, I asked the parents on our high school’s PTO Facebook group if anyone else was dealing with a teenager who didn’t have the best attitude about this yet. The responses reassured me that adjusting to this new normal was going to take a little bit of time. One mom shared a meme that said: “OK, the schools are closed. Does that mean we drop the kids off at the teacher’s house, or what?”

Regardless of how much we appreciated teachers before, multiply that by a hundred now.

The thought of another two months of this prompted me to post a different question on Twitter: “Are any of y’all’s homeschools accepting transfer students?”